Opinions

TV users who spend an above average amount of time watching on weekdays tend to be more likely to churn compared to those who spend more than the average time watching during the weekend. That is one insight from a recent study that confirms that the best predictors of churn are viewership and engagement. TV personalisation also helps keep subscribers. And brand new subscribers who engage with personalisation tools are up to 140% more likely to stay as customers.

Growing OTT consumption emphasises the importance of Wi-Fi Quality of Experience. Operators need to proactively prevent problems and avoid customer calls and truck rolls. For this, they need visibility into the end-to-end service delivery, data usage and device environment, and the use of prescriptive and automated remediation techniques, working in real-time. Combining TR-069 data with usage behaviour and machine learning is a large part of the solution, and early implementations of this approach show tangible operational and business benefits.

OTT means content providers can reach world markets, but they need to ensure compliance with local regulations. In order to achieve this with large volumes of video, you have to look beyond manual classification. Next-generation QC checking technology, harnessing AI, ML and computer vision algorithms, means you can automatically label and categorise content. By identifying objects, actions, scenes and spoken or visual words in streaming content, you can flag the presence of nudity, violence, alcohol, smoking, vaping and different levels of sexual activity, among other things.

The issue of credential sharing has become too big and too expensive for media companies to ignore. Tracking technology is one solution, but digitally-savvy consumers could cover their tracks with a VPN that alters their IP address and so masks their true location. And because legitimate users may use a VPN due to online privacy concerns, broadcasters cannot simply block all VPN users. Instead, you have to take a more granular look at viewing patterns and user behaviour to flag suspicious use.

After hosting a roundtable of experts, GfK has articulated current sentiment and the most pressing issues surrounding media metrics and measurement. We need to combine existing measurement skills with the latest datasets, including behavioural and transactional, to deliver actionable insights for traditional media planning and programmatic. We will need big datasets like set-top box data to understand ratings on individual addressable TV campaigns. Passively measured ad exposure can be directly linked to transactional data to help provide a total customer view, and to indicate media ROI. There is widespread support for the concept of JICs.

The majority of media companies still think of, and produce content, in a linear and programme-centric fashion, requiring a high degree of human intervention. The move to story-centric production will mean they can maximise the value of each piece of content. Much of the technology needed for this transition is available today. To start with, AI-based tools now enable enriched metadata to be automatically generated and support the creation of new workflows that allow metadata to be handled correctly by MAM solutions.

This article reviews the pain points when offering live streaming events, like how to ensure you are not broken by the authentication process when there are half a million authentication and/or session token refresh requests every second in the last moments before the event starts. It considers how you avoid entitlements-based latency or the horror of consumers being ejected during the live stream due to failed entitlement checks. You can read about the need to ‘pre-warm’ your cloud resources and to ensure that your customer care team has the ability to bypass, whitelist or adjust an IP address in real-time now that TTL values have been reduced from days to hours.

Pay TV analysts Ampere Analysis have shown that consumers who make the shift to streaming services still value studio brands. They watch more TV too, in the broad sense of the word, through so-called SVOD stacking. The online experience is increasingly fragmented, however, with consumers weaving their way through a maze of menus and across multiple apps and devices to find what they want. This all adds up to an opportunity for Pay TV providers if they claim the role of super-aggregator.

Videonet is a leading source of strategic insight, analysis and news about post-convergence television. We explore the challenges and opportunities for the TV industry as it introduces more on-demand content and evolves towards multi-screen delivery, companion experiences and a hybrid broadcast/IP connected TV universe